Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Four

Home alone with a sprained ankle and feeling very sorry for myself, I wanted nothing more than ice cream. I wanted a pint Ben & Jerry's, with more nuts and chunks and fudge ripples than actual ice cream, and I wanted to eat the entire thing from the container while I sat with my foot up on ice and watched a dreadful movie on our tiny TV set. So, I limped my way to the car, and drove two blocks to the dairy. The options were grim. There was no Ben & Jerry's, no Häagen-Dazs, no nothing in a pint, in fact, except for some generic gelato. There were some equally generic tubs of foamy stuff, and two freezers full of brightly packaged ice creams on sticks, none of which were appealing. I settled on something I'd seen advertised, which is a block of vanilla ice cream, one-half sandwiched between two not-very-chocolatey biscuits, and one-half dipped in milk chocolate and ground almonds. I ate it in the car and found it rather dissatisfactory.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Three

This afternoon, the family at the big house had a barbecue. We had a few glasses of wine as the sun set, and then started grilling. It was dark by the time we were ready to eat, but there were more guests than plates. Our hostess asked me to run down to our shack and get some more, and, in my haste to keep people from waiting hungrily, I ran down the hill to find the front door of our little house locked. In the dark, I skipped along the path that goes around to the back door, and then came down with a snap on my foot where there was an unexpected and unseen step down. I cried. It is said that most accidents happen close to home. It's rather ironic that I managed to go night-hiking unharmed, only to sprain my ankle the next day, five paces from my own front door.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-Two

This afternoon, we went to Karekare. I had a bad headache, so as we walked on the beach, I kept my eyes closed, with Aldo's arm around me (an exercise I'd done at summer camp as a kid, called a trust walk). When I eventually opened my eyes, he'd led me away from the beach to the wetlands where families of black swans live. We climbed a black sand dune and crossed a footbridge. Without realizing the time, we decided to walk back a different way, on the Hillary trail that follows the ridge behind the beach. Dusk fell. The climbing was hard and I was tired, but I knew that each minute I stopped to rest was a moment of daylight squandered, so I pushed on. Nevertheless, we spent over an hour hiking in the black night. There was no moon. Sometimes, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw only the same darkness. This became a real trust walk, both of us shuffling slowly forward, single file, feeling for the trail through our soles. When I fell off the trail, wailing, I had no idea how far down the drop was from which Aldo pulled me back up.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty-One

The big news today is that the New Zealand government has apologized to Maori rugby players for having complied with South Africa's requirements during apartheid that the country only send white players to the world cup games in that place. Some years, South Africa did allow Maori players to come, but made them "honorary whites." This is revolting. The South African government apologized last week, and suggested that New Zealand apologize as well, and for some strange reason, a week of public conversations were required before this actually happened. I actually heard a panel discussion on public radio during which the speakers said that the government shouldn't apologize, because they were tired of our new culture of apology. This is revolting.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixty

Today, the cover story in the New Zealand Herald was about the gang-related "assault" of a four-year-old boy on the playground.* If, however, you actually read the article, you found that the assault consisted of a man taunting the child for wearing a red shirt, then poking him and pulling the shirt off. Now, I am not condoning this behavior, but is it really assault? This label strikes me more as a diagnosis for this country's particular hysteria; in the states, it would be headlined as child molestation or attempted kidnapping. The mayor was quoted as saying, "Gang colours are part of life in any town in New Zealand," which is the most absurd thing I've ever heard. A local mother, the paper stated, stopped dressing her two children (3 and 5) in red, "After she heard of an 80-year-old woman being abused for the colour of her jersey in downtown Whakatane." What?!

*Article here.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Nine

Today it poured rain, so I couldn't do any washing. We slept in and went to the Packing Shed for brunch, where, for the first time, we sat inside, due to the weather. According to the sign taped up in the bathroom, if you want to sell your art at the Packing Shed, you should bring in 2-3 pieces to show to the owner. Indeed, the cafe is filled with 2-3 pieces each of different local artists' work, one of which was a very finely painted oil portrait of two chickens. I might take up chicken painting if I lived here permanently, too.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Eight

Tonight, Aldo was working in the lab quite late. Auckland closes up pretty early, but we were too tired to cook, and the only place we found open for dinner was a milk tea bar filled with trendy Asian youth playing cards. All of the waitresses had bangs, and none of them spoke comprehensible English. I haven't worn nail polish since my 8th grade graduation, but I was fixated by our waitress' manicure, which had mega-glitter tips. When we went to pay, Aldo asked to see her nails. "Bling bling!" she grinned, showing him her hands.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Seven

This morning, when we went out to the car, one of the chickens was in the driveway. "Chicken," I said, "What are you doing out here? Go back home." Instead, it walked out the gate and into the neighbor's yard. I took Aldo to the train station, and he said that I should probably get that chicken back inside and close the gates. When I got back home, I looked everywhere for that goddamned chicken, but I couldn't find it. All day, I've only seen two of the three chickens, and I am actually starting to worry about the darned thing.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifty-Six

This morning, we took our reading to the Alleluia café in town; usually we walk there from Graham’s house, but today, since we were coming from home, we took the car and parked it around a big corner. We walked through a small park to get there, encountering a marble sculpture of a grave man dressed in robes and sandals, carrying a tablet, with. . . horns emerging from his curls. A plate notified us that this was Moses. Hmm. What is the degree of political correctness of horned Jews these days?

Books: The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell

In writing about Russell’s tome, it is not my place to address individually the thoughts of the philosophers whom he discusses. Instead, my goal is only to assess the degree of success the author achieves in his own assessment of these figures and their works, as well as to comment on some of the thoughts that the reading of this book inspired in me.

If those two sentences feel extremely lucid, logical, and measured, it is because I have spent the past month steeped in the style of the greatest academic writer I have ever encountered. Typically, the prospect of reading 750 pages of what appears to be something not unlike a textbook would be rather daunting, but Russell writes with such grace and wit that the book is a pleasure. In fact, I find myself wishing that he had written a companion volume—the History of Eastern Philosophy—as well as a History of Western Art, a History of Western Economics, a History of Western Music, et cetera ad infinitum. Ideally, I would like to learn the history of the whole wide world, according to Bertrand Russell.

He’s not perfect—in the chapters on Plato, for example, he very uncharacteristically shuttles back and forth between describing Plato’s understanding of both “God” and “the gods,” without ever clarifying what that difference means, and whether Plato is the first monotheist in western philosophy’s trajectory. Furthermore, he leaves out one of my favorite philosophers—Søren Kierkegård—but includes other thinkers (e.g. Byron) who were not, technically, philosophers—though he does make a strong argument for such inclusions. But, considering the scope of the task, he is near enough.

Not having read many of his primary sources myself, I cannot say whether the strong focus on metaphysics (as opposed, for example, to ethics, which, though it is in some cases discussed, does not receive equal attention, though a pragmatist like myself would deem it far more important) belies a personal penchant of the author, or derives purely from the primary interests of the philosophers whom he discusses. I can say that, after a cursory examination, philosophers, on the whole, have quite absurd metaphysical tendencies. I could not, in fact, bring myself to agree with the comprehensive propositions—metaphysical, ethical, or otherwise—of any philosopher discussed until I reached the section on Locke. I was quite taken by Locke’s measured relativism (which I found to be not unlike Russell’s own), and even copied out a quotation which would have been good reading for President Bush (W.) on the eve of his Iraq invasion.* But, as the chapter moved on to illustrate Locke’s metaphysics, I was again stymied.

When I was a small child, I used to ask my father, a scientist and an atheist, where people came from. My curiosity was no doubt due in part to what I was learning in kindergarten at my Catholic school. This question of mine would lead us, always, through a long chain of technically unsound but generally meaningful evolutionary derivations. “People came from chimpanzees.” “Where did chimpanzees come from?” “Chimps came from smaller primates, like monkeys.” “Where did monkeys come from?” “Monkeys came from smaller mammals,” and so on, through sea creatures, and invertebrates, and single-celled organisms. The last two questions were always the same: “Where did the single-cell organism come from?” “Energy.” “Where did energy come from?” “It was always there.”

It was always there. So, I would say to him, there is God, he’s just energy; but my dad would shake his head and tell me no, energy in its pure state is not cohesive, it’s not a being, and it hasn’t the will of the thing that people call “God.” For a time, I believed what I was taught in school—that there was God, a god who had created me intentionally because of his love for me, individually, and that he had a plan for me, which he would reveal to me, when I was older. Later, I looked at the world, with its panoply of religions and ethical structures, its countries, its economies, its starving masses; I looked at the sky with its billions of stars and felt how small even the starving masses are, relative to the scope of the universe, and I condemned my earlier beliefs as naïve, the product of my tendency to passively accept information provided by authority figures. Anyway, what had been there at the beginning, be it energy or otherwise, ceased to matter. In fact, nothing mattered. I don’t mean that in the depressive’s sense. I simply mean that, ultimately, when considered against the scale of the universe, and the necessary infinitude of space and time, our lives here on Earth, in fact the existence of the entire planet itself, were random and meaningless. Though this thinking terribly depressed my mother, I, having read the portions of Nietzsche in which God is proclaimed dead, thus freeing all men to become gods themselves, found it rather liberating.

Russell divides his History into three sections: the Greeks, the Christians, and the Moderns. I tried, throughout the first two thirds of the book, and even half of the final third, to understand the various thinkers’ metaphysics, be the world comprised of something as simple as fire or as esoteric as windowless monads. In discussing this with Aldo, we became engaged in a conversation about quantum physics (which has always hurt my brain, and which I’ve never liked), including Schrödinger's cat (which I refuse to accept, for the cat knows whether the cat is alive or dead, and it matters to the cat), and the proposition that, in a vacuum containing only a single electron, that electron could be measured as simultaneously inhabiting more than one position (which I also refuse to accept, although I accept that there is a possibility for that electron to inhabit more than one position, and that, as additional electrons are introduced into the vacuum, that range of possibilities decreases. Frankly, even if an electron does inhabit multiple positions simultaneously in a vacuum, it does not matter to me, because we do not live in a vacuum; thus, metaphysically speaking, the point seems to me moot).

Having had this conversation the night before, now sitting alone in our friend’s living room in the dying light of day, pondering the infinitude of space and time, I had a momentary lapse of reason. Everything is made out of electrons. As if I had smoked some drug that I have never smoked, this suddenly concerned me greatly. Why? I asked myself. Why are there electrons? I found this extremely disconcerting and, to the best of my understanding of the term, tripped for about ten minutes or so as the room went from orange to blood red to dark purple to black with the setting sun. Somehow, I was able to pull myself out of this upon realizing that electrons don’t actually exist per se, but only as a way that we measure energy. And I had long ago accepted that “Energy was always there,” after all, the Law of Conservation of Energy states that Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed from one form to another. And, since energy exists now, and it cannot be created, it was always there, Q.E.D.

Furthermore, I decided that, yes, at a most basic level, I am made of nothing but energy, and that the curtain hanging against that window, too, is made of nothing but energy. Metaphysically speaking, then, it makes no difference whether I spend the remainder of my life sitting on a couch, eating KFC from a cardboard bucket, and watching marathons of MTV’s The Real World on television, or instead move to Malawi to teach HIV-positive women and orphans organic farming. But this is absurd. Ethically, I know that there is a difference. Therefore, I can throw all Metaphysics out the window, for its truths are truths inapplicable to the scale of our world, our society, our lives. What matters is ethics—how do we know what we should do? For too long, people have tried to determine their ethics based on metaphysics (this is the mode of religion). A truly relevant and efficacious ethical system is based on a smaller scale: be there a God or gods, ideal ideas or things-in-themselves, our actions have consequences here and now that are far more relevant. This is my thinking, not Bertrand Russell’s, but I think that he would approve. I think that John Locke would approve as well.

*"We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavour to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill as obstinate and perverse because they will not renounce their own and receive our opinions, or at least those we would force upon them, when it is more than probable that we are no less obstinate in not embracing some of theirs. For where is the man that has uncontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns; or can say, that he has examined to the bottom all his own or other men's opinions? The necessity of believing without knowledge, nay often upon very slight grounds, in this fleeting state of action and blindness we are in, should make us more busy and careful to inform ourselves than to restrain others. . . . There is reason to think, that if men were better instructed themselves, they would be less imposing on others." John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Chapter XVI, Section 4, as quoted in Russell, page 555.

Clearly having taken this to heart, Russell writes, "In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held" (47). I would like to think we could substitute "studying a philosopher" with "negotiating with another party," and give this wisdom to the leaders of parties (from local to international) in conflict. In fact, as Russell concludes, writing in 1946, "To frame a philosophy capable of coping with men intoxicated with the prospect of almost unlimited power and also with the apathy of the powerless is the most pressing task of our time" (660). How prescient was this man! But who will take up this task?